Early Morning Opera (EMO) is a genre-bending performance and art lab whose works explore emerging technologies, live audiences, and unclassifiable experience, while reflecting artistic director Lars Jan’s background in progressive activism. Our works chart complex constellations of ideas through language and other media, and assert the vital function of live events in our increasingly screen-based world.

Since presenting our first work in 2004, EMO has evolved into a permeable network of principal artists and an ever-expanding group of new collaborators, with expertise in fields as diverse as data visualization, architecture, climate paleontology, cognitive neuroscience, and experimental plumbing.

Developed through multi-year processes, EMO projects don’t look much like one another. This diversity of output is partially due to the permeable, ever-expanding nature of the company’s collaborative structure, which is often inclusive of non-artists, and also attributable to the investigative, experimental nature of our process, reflected in the maxim: Art is Research, Performance is a Lab. 

A hallmark of our work is an integrated, expressive use of emerging technologies in live performance. Due to the aesthetic and formal diversity of our projects, we have been commissioned and presented by media centers, museums, galleries, theaters and film festivals across the U.S., including the Whitney Museum, The Sundance Film Festival, Under the Radar Festival, EMPAC, REDCAT, PICA TBA Festival, and the BAM Next Wave Festival.